09/14/17

Finding Treasure

By: T F Stern | Self-Educated American

It’s been a year since we packed up my parent’s house and sold it after my mom died.  We’ve had boxes of photographs and framed pictures stored in a climate controlled U-haul unit until such time as we could figure out where to put them in our house in Buffalo, Texas.  That time has arrived.

I had no idea what framed pictures were in each box as they’d been professionally packed and boxed; took several hours to get past the Styrofoam peanuts, bubble wrap and plastic adhesive that had been applied to the glass on certain pictures.  It took four large black plastic trash bags to haul off the packing material and that didn’t include cutting the boxes down flat so they didn’t take up the entire dining room.

We now have the guest bedroom lined wall to wall with an odd assortment of pictures and paintings; some of which are probably quite valuable as they are museum quality; but that’s not the kind of treasure I’m excited about.

Other items that were packed away from my folk’s house were thrown into large cardboard boxes and we used anything available for packing material; kitchen towels, bath towels, ornamental pillows, stuffed animals…anything to keep fragile items from breaking.  I found a real treasure among the packing material to protect a table lamp; a hand made quilt that had been sewn by my grandmother, signed on the back.   Priceless!

Other treasures among the packing material would include cross stitched linen table clothes; also my grandmother’s handiwork.  These were placed on a shelf out of the way until this morning when I decided they should be put into service; but you can’t simply toss an old wrinkled up table cloth on the table and expect it to have the same effect as when it’s been carefully ironed and displayed properly.

There’s something to the process of ‘living in elegance’ that requires a little more effort.  It took me an hour to iron two table cloths; there are at least three more cross stitched table cloths that require the same loving care to restore them to usable status.

While filling my glass yesterday I noticed that I’d almost thrown away a ‘limited edition’ Dr Pepper soda can.  So glad I caught that in time or it would have gone to the recycle bin and lost forever.  Exactly what constitutes a ‘limited edition’ can of Dr Pepper?

We have a biscotti jar on the hutch.  It had been a Christmas present many years ago, filled with a variety of chocolate covered biscotti; but the jar was too beautiful to simply throw away after the biscotti had been eaten.  We’d given a similar jar to my sister in law; something of an inside joke.

Her husband, John, died a few years back.  He’d been cremated and his ashes placed in an old shoe box that was kept in the closet; not exactly how John would expect to be treated for time and all eternity.  We quietly hinted that John could use an upgrade; perhaps the biscotti jar would be a better ‘final resting place’ or at least better than the shoe box.

…And it would have been, had she not dropped the biscotti jar.  Maybe we’ll give her our biscotti jar; or better yet, buy her a new one at Sam’s Wholesale, one that’s filled with a nice variety of chocolate covered biscotti.  Treasure is in the eye of the beholder.

09/14/17

Conservatives Have to Become the Resistance

By: Cliff Kincaid*

Despite the election of President Trump, which seemed to momentarily disrupt Democratic Party plans for total control, conservatives are losing politically. Trump’s basic failure was the inability to seize control of the Pentagon and intelligence agencies away from Obama and his holdovers. Conservatives that Trump tried to put in were systematically purged. He’s the ultimate target. It’s unclear whether he can save himself.

We see the results in the failure by Trump and his top officials to name radical Islamists as the enemy in his 9/11 speech. Homeland security analyst Ryan Mauro says, “By omitting any mention of Islamism or jihad, the Trump Administration’s language is even closer to that of the Obama Administration than Hillary Clinton, who defined the enemy as ‘jihadists.’ President Obama refused to use any terminology associated with Islam at all.” He did say, however, that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Trump is making deals with Democrats, ranging from debt to taxes and spending, as the national debt surpasses $20 trillion. He seems to be leaning toward some form of amnesty for DACA “dreamers” and maybe other illegal aliens. The Democrats, meanwhile, are embracing a total federal takeover of the health care system, as represented by Senator Bernie Sanders’ unveiling of a “single-payer” plan to replace Obamacare. This is what happens when federal programs fail. The Marxists call for more government to “fix” the problem they created.

Of course, this is happening because the Republican Congress failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, and is now moving on to something else.

What’s happening is a phenomenon that writer Vic Biorseth calls “Obamunism,” the “American” brand of communism that marches on. Obama is out of office, but not out of power.

Considering the failures of the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress, conservatives are the ones who should be leading the resistance. They did so, at one time, and it was called the Tea Party movement. It helped elect a Republican Congress, despite the efforts of the Obama IRS to stifle and strangle this grass-roots movement of conservatives dedicated to individual freedom, private property rights, and small government.

But now we learn that the Trump Justice Department has abandoned any effort to hold the IRS accountable for its political persecution of the Tea Party movement. Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the center of the scandal over targeting of Tea Party groups, will not be prosecuted.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said, “I have the utmost respect for Attorney General Sessions, but I’m troubled by his Department’s lack of action to fully respond to our request and deliver accountability. Today’s decision does not mean Lois Lerner is innocent. It means the justice system in Washington is deeply flawed.”

Yet the Department of Justice describes itself as leading the nation “in ensuring the protection of all Americans while preserving their constitutional freedoms.”

Republicans say Obama’s guy, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, was “repeatedly uncooperative and misled congressional investigators” during the scandal. But’s he’s still there.

Some conservatives are so troubled by what’s going on that they are circulating information from marijuana enthusiast Roger Stone that Trump has been drugged by a globalist satanic cabal. Someone wrote to me, “Trump is incrementally being poisoned through his ice tea or other foods and needs an independent third party doctor to examine him.”

What we are witnessing does not require a sinister conspiracy theory. This is the growth of government, including the swamp that Trump said he would drain. But what is the swamp?

The decision to keep Koskinen and protect Lerner demonstrates the corruption that characterizes the nature of the swamp. But the Justice Department appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Russia-gate Special Counsel is another example.

Nobody likes to talk about it, but Mueller covered-up the nature of the real perpetrators of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks. The evidence indicates that the anthrax was stolen from a U.S. lab by an al Qaeda operative. Instead, Mueller led an investigation that blamed a series of innocent American scientists, eventually forcing one to take his own life. He followed up by ordering FBI training materials to ignore the role of the Islamist ideology that inspires the enemy. Judicial Watch said Mueller thus became an agent of a broader Islamist “influence operation” aimed at “our government and Constitution.” These forces still exist, as evidenced by Trump’s failure to name the enemy on 9/11.

The corruption is so deep that even one of Mueller’s own FBI investigators, Kenneth Lambert, sued him for the job he did. Now, a former State Department analyst who has followed the case is suing the DOJ and the FBI for documents that are still being improperly withheld.

The FBI seems hopelessly corrupt. But despite all the talk about Mueller’s successor, James Comey, failing to properly investigate Hillary Clinton, it is President Obama who should have been investigated. In a dump of documents (189 pages of “investigative notes”) from the FBI on a Friday last September, it was noticed by a few journalists that Obama, like Clinton, was described as using a non-secure private email address. They communicated through these accounts. What’s more, Obama used a pseudonym. What was he hiding? Who else was he communicating with?

If the FBI suddenly investigated Obama because he and Hillary were guilty of the same crimes, that would have not only derailed Hillary’s campaign but raised questions about why the FBI did not conduct a CARL test (Character, Associates, Reputation, and the Loyalty) of Obama when he ran for office. The FBI had to know of Obama’s communist connections because the bureau had monitored his communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, for 19 years.

It is fascinating that federal employees have to fill out a background investigation form (Standard Form 86) for national security positions, but Obama and members of his Congressional Progressive Caucus do not.  Meanwhile, Special Counsel Mueller and his FBI agents are going through every nook and cranny of President Trump’s personal, political, and financial life, in order to make a case against him and force his resignation from office.

It’s important to remember that Trump’s election was a major setback for the identity politics of the left, as white people finally reacted to the “Brown is the New White” electoral strategy that Obama and Hillary were depending on to win. The author of a book by the same name, Steve Phillips, has a history of involvement in Marxist politics, just like his friend, Barack Obama.  They had counted on the workers to carry the Obama revolution forward. The white working class deserted the Democrats.

As Obama emerges again on the national and global scene, the Trump victory gives conservatives the opportunity to understand what happened under our first Marxist President and how it can be reversed. The lesson, eight months into the Trump presidency, is that conservatives have to become the resistance. They have to revolt against the Republican establishment while continuing to pressure the Trump Administration to fulfill its campaign promises.

Until and unless Obama is investigated by the Trump Department of Justice (with a new FBI Director by the name of Christopher Wray), there is no hope for our country.

The problem is that, according to his bio, Wray in 2003 served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and that, in addition to overseeing criminal matters, he “played a key role in the evolving national security mission of the Department.” That means he had to know that Mueller’s probe of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks was badly mishandled and that the real culprits got away. Wray has to know that Mueller’s objective is to take down Trump.

A full-scale probe of the former president and his involvement in a communist network that stretches from Havana to Moscow to even to the Vatican in Rome may be the only way for Trump to truly save his presidency. It would fulfill his central campaign promise to “drain the swamp.” He must fire Mueller and then urge his supporters to be the “resistance” to Marxist identity politics and government corruption.

For those who question the inclusion of the Vatican in this list, consider that George Neumayr’s new book, The Political Pope, identifies a communist mentor for Francis as well and argues the case that the Marxist-oriented pope is “abandoning conservatives” so Rome can be included in a post-Christian New World Order.

The corruption in the U.S. intelligence community threatens our national survival. It explains not only the timid treatment of radical Islam, but why the Obama Administration failed to stop North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, why it made a deal to virtually assure that Iran would get them as well, and why the U.S. is still bogged down in a no-win war in Afghanistan. National survival requires a winning strategy that identifies our enemies.

An investigation of Obama is absolutely critical to safeguarding the national security of the United States and evicting traitors from the swamp. What the Justice Department and the FBI should be doing is probing Obama’s operations as a foreign agent for anti-American interests ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Russians and the international communist movement. That’s is the case we make in our two recent books, Comrade Obama Unmasked and Red Star Rising.

However, on his way out of office, in a clever dialectical maneuver, Obama launched Russia-gate to divert attention from his own background and curious and controversial foreign connections.

It was a classic communist propaganda technique. As the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security explained in a 1967 study on The Techniques of Soviet Propaganda, “Soviet propaganda uses as a fundamental psychological stratagem the ancient and familiar ruse of crying ‘thief’ to divert attention from its own thievery.”

By design, Russia-gate is missing the real Russian agent – Obama himself. This is the worst cover-up of all time, concealing from the American people that their first Marxist President was a security risk possibly being blackmailed by Russia.

Our upcoming November 10 conference, “How the Russia-gate Conspiracy Theory Has Set the Stage for Obama’s Return to Power,” will take place from Noon to 5:00 pm, Zenger Room, National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW, 13th Floor, Washington, DC 20045. Please go to www.usasurvival.org for more information.

*Cliff Kincaid has written two books on Obama, two on the United Nations, and many on media bias.  His public policy group America’s Survival, Inc., has produced several films and videos on America’s first Marxist president and was instrumental in disclosing Obama’s communist connections in Chicago and Hawaii before he was elected. Cliff can be reached at [email protected]

09/14/17

The $10 Trillion Resource North Korea Can’t Tap

North Korea may not have proved petroleum reserves, but it’s estimated that the secluded belligerent nation sits on reserves of more than 200 minerals—including rare earth minerals—worth an estimated up to US$10 trillion.

Of course, there are no official reports on how much North Korea’s mineral wealth really is, but according to rough estimates from earlier this decade, Pyongyang’s deposits of coal, iron ore, zinc, copper, graphite, gold, silver, magnesite, molybdenite, and many others, are worth between US$6 trillion and US$10 trillion, as per South Korean projections reported by Quartz.

Before the fall of the USSR, North Korea had prioritized mineral mining and trade with fellow communist partners. But the mining industry has been in decline since the early 1990s, due to decades of neglect and lack of funds for infrastructure development to support mining activities.

Now North Korea’s mining sector trade is under a full ban by the UN, as Pyongyang has stepped up both nuclear missile tests and belligerent rhetoric in recent months. The UN started banning trade in metals last year, but there have been reports that Kim Jong-Un’s regime has grown increasingly inventive in circumventing sanctions.

The UN introduced last month a full ban on coal, iron, and iron ore, after having banned trade in copper, nickel, silver, and zinc in November last year. China also implemented the coal import ban, cutting off an important economic lifeline of the regime. Coal trade has generated over US$1 billion in revenue per year for North Korea, the U.S. Department of Treasury said at the end of August, when it slapped sanctions on Russian and Chinese entities for supporting the regime.

On Monday, following North Korea’s latest nuclear test on September 2, the UN Security Council banned the supply, sale, or transfer of all condensates and natural gas liquids, and banned Pyongyang’s exports of textiles such as fabrics and apparel products. The latest sanctions, however, are not imposing a full oil embargo as the U.S. called for in recent weeks. The sanctions instead are capping refined petroleum products and crude oil supply, after the U.S. dropped its demand for full oil ban, to avoid China vetoing the UN resolution.

All the sanctions leading to Monday’s strongest prohibitions so far have been designed to stifle North Korea’s trade in minerals and cut off money for the regime.

North Korea has staked mostly on coal mining, the cheapest and easiest to mine, compared to precious metals or rare earth metals mining, for which Pyongyang has neither the funds nor the infrastructure or know-how to develop.

North Korea has sizeable deposits of some minerals. Its magnesite reserves are the second largest in the world behind China, and its tungsten deposits are likely the sixth-largest in the world, Lloyd R. Vasey, founder and senior adviser for policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), wrote in April this year. North Korea sits on sizeable deposits of more than 200 different minerals, and “all have the potential for the development of large-scale mines”, Vasey said.

North Korea doesn’t have either the funds or the infrastructure to develop those resources. It’s also officially banned to export them.

Yet, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication,” a UN report of a panel of experts from February this year concluded.

“Diplomats, missions and trade representatives of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea systematically play key roles in prohibited sales, procurement, finance and logistics. In particular, designated entities are trading in banned minerals, showing the interconnection between trade of different types of prohibited materials,” the panel’s report reads.

According to UN experts—as of February this year—North Korea had adapted to the stricter sanctions “through various tactics, including identity fraud.”

“Their ability to conceal financial activity by using foreign nationals and entities allows them to continue to transact through top global financial centres,” according to the report.

According to a more recent investigation by ABC Four Corners, North Korea has business interests in Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe, contrary to the common perception that it is a very isolated country. Office 39—one of the departments of its Workers’ Party—is “the ultimate slush fund”, reportedly generating up to US$1.6 billion annually for Kim’s lavish lifestyle, while 70 percent of people are food insecure.

“North Korea is very sophisticated in concealing the fact that it is, indeed, North Korea doing business overseas. It’s good at hiding in plain sight,” Andrea Berger, Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told the program.

Link to original article: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-10-Trillion-Resource-North-Korea-Cant-Tap.html

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com